Slavery and Christianity

from Thomas Clarkson, Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species

“What is Christianity but a system of murder and oppression? The cries and yells of the unfortunate people, who are now soon to embark for the regions of servitude, have already pierced my heart. Have you not heard me sigh while we have been talking? Do you not see the tears that now trickle down my cheeks? And yet these Christians are unable to be moved at all: nay, they will scourge them amidst their groans and even smile, while they are torturing them to death. Happy, happy Heathenism! Which can detest the vices of Christianity, and feel for the distresses of mankind!”

“But,” I reply, “Christianity is the most perfect and lovely of moral systems… The people against whom you so justly declaim, are not Christians. They are infidels. They are monsters.They are out of the common course of nature. Their countrymen at home are generous and brave. They support the sick, the lame, and the blind. They fly to the succor of the distressed. They have noble and stately buildings for the sole purpose of benevolence.”

The Experience of Slavery

from Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative

For though my master had not promised it to me, yet, besides the assurances I had received that he had no right to detain me, he always treated me with the greatest kindness, and reposed in me an unbounded confidence; he even paid attention to my morals; and would never suffer me to deceive him, or tell lies, of which he used to tell me the consequences; and that if I did so God would not love me; so that, from all this tenderness, I had never once supposed in all my dreams of freedom, that he would think of detaining me any longer than I wished….

The ‘Blood-Sugar’ Metaphor

from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On the Slave Trade”

If only one tenth part among you who profess yourselves Christians; if only one half only of the Petitioners; instead of bustling about with ostentatious sensibility were to leave off—not all West-Indian commodities—but only Sugar and Rum, the one useless and the other pernicious—all this misery might be stopped. Gracious Heaven! At your meals you rise up, and pressing your hands to your bosoms, you lift up your eyes to God, and say, “O Lord! Bless the food which thou hast given us!’ A part of that food amon most of you is sweetened with Brother’s Blood.’Lord! Bless the food that though hast given us?’ O Blasphemy! Did God give the food mingled with the Blood of the murdered? Will God bless the food which is polluted with the Blood of his own innocent children? Surely if the inspired Philanthropist of Galilee were to revisit Earth, and be among the Feasters as at Cana, he would not now change water into wine, but convert the produce into the things producing, the occasion into the things occasioned. Then with our fleshy eye should we behold what even now Imagination ought to paint to us; instead of conserves, tears, and blood, and for music, groanings and the loud peals of the lash!…

Provided the dunghill be not before their parlour window, they are well content to know that it exists, and that it is the hot-bed of their pastilent luxuries.—To this grievous failing we must attribute the frequency of wars, and the continuance of the Slave-trade. The merchant finds no argument against it in his ledger: the citizen at the crouded feast is not nauseated by the stench and filth of the slave-trade. The merchant finds no argument against it in his ledger: the citzen at the crouded feats is not nauseated by the stench and filth of the slave-vessel—the fine lady’s nerves are not shattered by the shrieks! She sips a beverage sweetened with human blood, even whils she is weeping over the refined sorrows of Werthe or of Clementina. Sensibility is not benevolence. Nay, by making us tremblingly alive to trifling misfortunes, it frequently prevents it, and induces effeminate and cowardly selfishness.